A deadline that has been circled on commodity traders' calendars for nearly a year is drawing closer: on Nov. 27, China's temporary suspension of export controls on antimony, gallium, germanium and several other dual-use minerals to the United States is set to expire, and buyers across the defense, battery and electronics industries are moving to secure supply before it does.
China's Ministry of Commerce announced the suspension in November 2025, pausing restrictions it had imposed a year earlier on shipments of the minerals to the US. The original controls, introduced in December 2024, required licenses for antimony exports and barred shipments outright for military end-uses, a response to escalating US tariffs and technology restrictions on Chinese firms. China produces the large majority of the world's refined antimony, a brittle, silvery metal used to harden lead in ammunition and batteries, as a flame retardant, and in semiconductor and solar-cell manufacturing.
A Market Already Repriced
Antimony prices have stayed elevated throughout the reprieve rather than returning to pre-2024 levels, as buyers and traders have treated the suspension as temporary rather than a resolution of the underlying trade dispute. Prices remain well above where they stood before China first moved to restrict exports, even after easing from peaks reached earlier in 2026, reflecting a market that has priced in the risk of renewed controls, according to industry pricing reports. Western miners and governments have used the past year to try to reduce their reliance on Chinese supply: projects in Idaho, Montana and Australia have moved toward production, and the US Defense Logistics Agency has continued building out a strategic stockpile of the metal, which the Pentagon classifies as a critical mineral with no substitute in several munitions applications.
Whether Beijing extends the suspension past Nov. 27 remains an open question, and one with direct consequences for ammunition makers, battery manufacturers and solar-panel producers that depend on the metal. A lapse would not necessarily mean an immediate return to the outright restrictions of late 2024 — China has used partial measures, licensing delays and informal guidance to manage mineral flows in the past — but traders and procurement officers at affected companies are, for now, treating the deadline as the next flashpoint in a trade relationship that has repeatedly used critical minerals as leverage.
The antimony episode has become one of several test cases for how reliant US industry remains on Chinese-controlled mineral supply chains, alongside parallel disputes over rare earths and graphite, and is likely to feature in any broader trade discussions between Washington and Beijing before the deadline arrives.
